Google Archive

Andy Rubin is a vice president for engineering at Google, and he is responsible for the Android mobile operating system project. He recently had an hour long chat with The New York Times' Brad Stone, sharing his insights into things like openness, the lack of secret APIs in Android, and several other things. Of course, the jabs at Apple were prevalent.

Well, this was about as inevitable as Apple not losing a super-secret iPhone prototype: Google and Adobe have pretty much formed an alliance against the iPhone, in true the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend style. The agreement between the two companies is clearly a big middle finger towards Apple and the iPhone. Update: Apple has finally added a framework to Mac OS X that will enable accelerated Flash video content - something Adobe has been asking for. This should enable Adobe to greatly improve Flash video performance on Mac OS X. Anyone know about Linux?

"The Internet is one of the world's most important means of free expression. Yet censorship of the Web is growing; more than 40 governments censor information today, up from about four in 2002. And some governments are blocking - or proposing to block - content even before it reaches their citizens. Authoritarian countries are building firewalls and cracking down on dissent, dealing harshly with anyone who breaks the rules. We at Google believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship online. That's why we are launching a tool that will give people information about the government requests for content removal and user data that Google receives from around the world." Biggest problem I've seen: figures are absolute, not relative (i.e., they are not comparable per country).

Now this is something that I find really interesting. We all know and love Google Chrome/Chromium (and if you don't, you're demonstrably wrong), but Google recently made a change in the developer version that ruffled some feathers: the URL field will no longer show the "http://". This made a lot of people very upset.

Okay, this news hit my inbox and the OSNews queue this morning (and another ten million times during the day) but since I was doing more important things than OSNews today, I only now have the time to dive into this. A site I've never heard before claims that Google will open source the VP8 video codec next month, providing the world with a high-quality, royalty and patent-free codec, which will most likely cause the internet to spontaneously start farting unicorns.

This, people, is a big one. Remember all the articles we had on Theora, H264, and which codec is better suited for HTML5 video? Well, it seems that Google has officially decided to put some serious weight behind... Theora. What they're doing is a baby step, but one specific aspect of that baby step is very important: Google is openly stating that Theora is free of patents.

Two months ago, Google announced its intention to stop censoring search results in China, while also stating it may even leave the country altogether. The announcement followed the news that Chinese crackers had attempted to crack the accounts of human rights activists. The search giant has stayed true to its word: starting today, search results are no longer censored in China. Google employed a clever trick to get there: they reroute Chinese users to the uncensored Hong Kong version of Google. Instant update: China has already responded: "Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks."

Google's Native Client (NaCl) is a browser technology to deliver native x86 binaries to users on Windows, Mac and Linux. Whilst this bridges the gap between modern JavaScript speeds and native binaries, portability is limited and that's especially important on the web where there's greater device diversity than on the desktop. Google are announcing that NaCl now also supports x86-64 and ARM. In addition to this Google are also announcing the ANGLE project, an open source compatibility layer to map WebGL (OpenGL ES for the web) to DirectX calls for Windows systems without an OpenGL library.

"Google is changing the way it handles the unique identifier that accompanies each installation of its Chrome browser. As noticed by H-Online, a Google white paper says the company will now delete the unique ID after the browser updates itself for the first time. Google has confirmed with The Reg that the change will be made with the upcoming Chrome 4.1."

Jim Bray, who played a major role in the XML standardisation effort, has joined Google to work on Android, and his words for the iPhone are pretty harsh. "The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet's future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it."

My colleague Thom wrote an excellent evaluation of the European antitrust investigation of Google yesterday. I agree with much of what Thom says in his article, including the statements that the investigation isn't surprising and that it's fishy that the complaining companies have ties to Microsoft. What I don't agree with is the offhanded comment that Google has "pretty much a monopoly in search." There was a lively discussion on this point in the comments, but I thought that rather than join the fray there, I'd exercise my monopoly power and put my thoughts into an editorial.

Well, this was pretty much inevitable. With Google having pretty much a monopoly in search, it's not surprising to see authorities putting the company under a microscope, and this is exactly what the European Commission is doing. The EC has launched a fact-finding antitrust probe into Google. However, looking at where the probe originates from, some might have a sense of "ah!". Update: more bad news for Google.

The Mom of all internet companies, Google, has announced today that it will effectively become an internet service provider. The company is planning on building a number of ultra high-speed broadband networks in select locations in the United States, serving anywhere between 50000 and 500000 users.

"Google updated its Chrome browser's developer's builds to version 5 for Windows and Mac today, the first time any version of Chrome has reached that milestone. Google was expected to push version 5 out to the public before the end of the month. Unlike the more recent versions of developer's build 4.x, the developer's builds of Chrome 5.x seems to be starting off to a rough start."